Dear Readers,
it’s been a while. (If you’re new here, thank you for subscribing!) I know there hasn’t been much here lately. I wish this weren’t the case. So, here I want to clear the air a bit and foreshadow what’s to come, which is a major revamp of this publication.
At some point earlier this year, I came to recognize that I was doing things wrong. I was working on Textual Variations post to post, article to article.
I had all these ideas, all these plans. I thought it would be relatively easy to prep something new every week. It wasn’t.
Writing the types of long, informative, yet interesting articles that I am naturally inclined towards took a lot more time and effort than I expected. Prepping them for publication was also not easy. I want every piece to look visually as well as it possibly can. And then, there is the advertising part. Once you make a post here, you really have to spread word around the web, make links on social media, ensure google picks it up, etc. And so updates fell behind, articles became sporadic. Things got more protracted because of real life events and the fact that I was also devoting a chunk of my writing time to Medium.
This was not the right approach to building up a Substack publication, which requires regular posting and updates to remain viable.
In order to truly make T.V. work right off the bat, I should’ve prepped a bunch of new articles in advance. I should’ve had a lot of shorter, simpler pieces to help draw attention to T.V. I should’ve had a backlog that I could then publish on a regular schedule, while writing new ones. This is what I intend to do with the planned revamp of Textual Variations.
For the last several months, I’ve been making preparations and digging into my archives of film and TV writing from the past 17 years to build a backlog. I’ve located lost film reviews from my time as a film critic for the NYU newspaper Washington Square News, unpublished essays from my many media studies courses, archived posts I had published on blogs forgotten to time. I’ve been breaking my 300-page dissertation on the history of textual variation in the film industry into short chunks that will form a T.V. series (get it?).
And, of course, I’ve been working on several brand new posts at once, which are in various states of completion. There’s some stuff written about Morbius, the film’s obvious rejiggering in post-production and the controversial misreadings of its post-credit scenes, which led critics to make false claims to viewers. There’s some stuff on David Lynch’s new edition of Inland Empire, which is playing in select theaters all this Summer, and additional information on his unmade 4-hour director’s cut of Dune. There’s a short little post about alternate episode orders for certain TV shows, and a really long one about a recut cult Dennis Hopper movie.
The sections will be different. What this means is that, going forward, the scope of Textual Variations will be expanding. In a good way. Why films change will remain the focus, but there will also be a lot more stuff where I just talk about subjects of interest, provide reviews of films and TV shows I’ve seen, etc.
When everything is ready, articles will be published regularly. I want T.V. to function as a well-oiled machine with at least one new post for 52 weeks, to hit the ground running and then keep it going without interruption for a year.*
*Then things might need to slow down a little, perhaps a production hiatus will be necessary, as occurs with television shows, but we’ll see what happens when we get there.
When exactly will this kick off? At the moment, I am aiming for some time this summer, likely June or July, but haven’t locked down the exact date. We’ll see what happens. Life can be quite unpredictable.
But rest assured that change is coming.
Best,
Mikhail
Glad to hear it. I was hoping to see you continue with the newsletter as I find the insights cool.
You’re probably going to have a much better time with the new plan.
One suggestion is that you can import your content from previous blogs like medium if you want. That way you don’t have to repost it necessarily.